Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed an executive order in 2016 on telecommuting, noting that letting public employees work remotely can “reduce transportation-related greenhouse-gas emissions.” And those emissions do add up, especially if you commute from Morocco to Washington—as the Governor’s senior climate policy adviser, Chris Davis, has done since August.

“ Heather and I have hoped to expose our two boys to life overseas and an opportunity to act on that long-held goal recently materialized when she was offered a teaching position [in] Marrakesh, Morocco,” Mr. Davis told his colleagues in an email last summer obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner. Lucky for him, “as our climate work has grown increasingly international in scope, the Governor asked me to continue to help build those networks from abroad.”

When Mr. Davis traveled from Marrakesh to New York to Washington for work this fall, he incurred more than $3,700 in taxpayer-funded expenses. He emitted more than 4,500 pounds of carbon on the journey, according to a United Nations flight emissions calculator. The Governor’s office also approved $2,082 in expenses for Mr. Davis’s expedition from Morocco to Germany in November.